Ok happy Monday! At risk of giving a slightly trope-y response, I think of design as the ability to identify and solve leveraged problems. I think of engineering almost exactly the same as design, just with more emphasis on the solving part. I see many people who are adopting the persona of “design engineer” who seem mostly into the veneer layer of software, like making interfaces a little more animated or expressive. Those aren’t in and of themselves bad things necessarily, but if all you are doing is taking someone else’s design (their solution, their intent, maybe exemplified in a facsimile like a mockup) and implementing it into an existing system (following established principles and frameworks, never really concerning yourself with anything beyond the DOM), then that’s just like being an assembly line decorator. Which doesn’t have zero value! But it has far less value than someone I could task with figuring out how we should increase a specific KPI or take better advantage of caching and bundling to reduce costs and load times for our mobile users if we are blowing up in parts of Asia or Africa and understands the tradeoffs of multiple competing solutions. So instead of chasing trendy titles I think it’s more valuable to just excel at design or engineering, first, before trying to do both and, like most fusion restaurants, just being bad at either.

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Wonder's first ever design challenge is here. 👀 $10,000 in prizes, free Pro for the month to build something wonderful. → c87.to/jul26-wonder-challeng…